The Ceaseless Snip-Snip-Snip of a Dying State
Fifteen years of cuts have left the UK trying to "efficiency" its way out of a collapse - and somehow still expecting growth to show up as well.
This is Bearly Politics, an independent publication about politics, power and the persistent urge to bang one’s head gently against the nearest wall. I’m - healthcare strategist by day, writer by night and during commutes and apparently on the brink of a very polite, Excel induced nervous breakdown.
A small warning: This post is long - it’s half essay and half primal scream, and entirely a result of trying to “do more with less” until something in my brain quietly went POP!
I am convinced there’s something wrong with my ears - I’m constantly hearing sounds that cannot possibly be there. I hear it on the tube, I hear it at my desk and even sometimes on my stupid mental-health walk on the days that I have time for it.
An ever-present, constant echoing sound - the sound of cutting.
Snip-snip-snip.
Chop-chop-chop.
Slice-slice-slice.
It’s never-ending - and I know that I’m not alone, because to anyone who has been paying any sort of attention to UK politics, this soundtrack of scissors on loop will have now become a constant, and very unwelcome, companion.
Whether it’s Reform UK promising to cut local council spending by amounts that could be mistaken for telephone numbers, the Conservatives still reaching for the shears based on pure reflex or Labour intoning “hard choices” like a grim Gregorian chant, there is no escaping that damned snipping, cutting, chopping sound.
All of it’s enough to drive even the most stable of us a bit wobbly, and the absolutely maddening part of it all is that after near 15 years of this constant reducing and not replacing is that there is now a simple truth that escapes our politicians:
There is nothing left to cut. Nada. Zilch. Niks. Fokkol1.
We have now officially reached the point that the cupboard is not only bare, it’s gone - we sold it off and we’re now hungrily staring at the floorboards to see if there’s any “fat” that’s left for us to cut.
But. There’s a reality check that needs to happen. One that doesn’t seem to be communicated in any meaningful form - the reality that when you actually look at the budgets we’re covering in this country, the balance sheet, for the most part, consists of pensions, health, care, education2 and debt interest.
The rest of the budget? The ones that politicians love to call waste? That’s a small and ever-shrinking slice that has already been mined like it’s the last seam in a Victorian pit, yet we’re told time and time again that all we need to do is “efficiency” just a bit more.
Except a nation simply cannot “efficiency” itself through children’s services, social care, policing, courts, local government, school buildings and hospitals without dire consequences - consequences like the ones we’ve been living through for years now.
The grand lie we were told for a good decade was that Austerity was a temporary correction - a short-term belt-tightening that would make us lean, nimble and terribly ready for growth3, except what we actually did was cannibalise the systems that are actually meant to create growth: education, health, transport, science, planning capacity in local government - all the unglamorous bits and pieces that allows private investment to actually happen.
The false-economies of Austerity are everywhere you look - we shut youth clubs and Sure Start centres to “save” money, only to spend twice the amount later on crisis intervention.
Councils lost libraries4, planners and environmental health teams - just to pay more to address homelessness and emergency housing. We underinvested in schools and hospitals until the walls literally started falling down and we froze public sector pay for so long that it is now impossible to recruit - and yet wonder aloud why no one wants to do the jobs that keep the country running.
If the country were a business, as has been intimated by the Tories for decades, the board would have been sacked5 for running down the core assets to try and blow smoke up the arse of quarterly numbers.
And yet, that sound is still there - the constant snip-snip-snipping.
Reform, to their credit, have at least done the country a favour by making the fantasy explicit - £90bn in tax cuts, they were crowing, while also promising to improve services and eliminating waste in a timeframe that defies… well, basic arithmetic. When the sums were checked by the grown-ups, the verdict was conclusive - the numbers do not add up. The imagined “waste” they would eradicate is, in reality, someone emptying a bin, staffing a ward, inspecting a bridge, teaching a child, processing a safeguarding referral, drafting a case for court or answering a 999 call.
You cannot cut “waste” when the supposed waste is the thing itself.
In the past few weeks, Reform Councillors have discovered - much to their horror - that the supposed “fat” that was there to be ruthlessly trim, just doesn’t exist. All the grants are gone, the fees have already been maxed out and the contracts have been shaved down to the bone years ago under the mantra of “cutting our coat according to our cloth.”
And so, in the real world, where bins must be collected, adults must be cared for, children must be kept safe, Reform councils will, like nearly every other council in this country have to do, what is unthinkable to them, raise council tax - because the cuts they were convinced were there simply don’t exist. The myth of costless “efficiencies” collides with the reality of potholes, adult social care costs, care packages that keep people alive and the various bits and pieces of statutory spending that must be met, but is barely mentioned by Nigel and Co.
It’s jolting seeing the rhetoric meet the spreadsheet6 - and it’s going to keep happening, especially to populists like Reform.
The Tories’ reflex is no less dissonant - after a decade and a half in which the state was placed on what is, in effect, a starvation diet, their first (and it seems only) instinct is front and present - “another round of cuts, waiter!”
You just can’t help but admire the consistency, if not the results - the party that outsourced, offshored and attrited the state’s capacity to function then found, during a once in a century pandemic and the largest peacetime administrative change in history, that capacity is exactly the thing you need to survive these shocks.
The government at the time responded with heroic improvisation - overpaying for PPE, rebuilding systems we had previously hollowed out to empty shells (hello, public health), begging retired professionals to return - just to promptly forget the lessons - “bring back the shears!”, Kemi Badenoch shouts.
The Labour government, for its part, seems to be trapped in the language of hesitant responsibility - “difficult decisions” we’re told, with an air of saintly resignation, as if the laws of thermodynamics require that a chancellor must inflict pain to be taken seriously7.
The problem with this is not that trade offs don’t exist - of course they do, and sometimes brutally so. The real problem is that we’re pretending that there is a route to growth that does not involve actually repairing the machine that produces it. You cannot “stability and certainty” your way into a productive economy when classrooms are leaking, hospitals cancel procedures for a lack of staff, courts creak under the weight of the backlog they’re carrying, trains keep failing and local authorities are one unforeseen circumstance from issuing a Section 114 notice.
Growth, no matter what they tell you, is not a “vibe” - it’s a result, a consequence.
You get growth when kids are taught in safe buildings with adequately supported teachers, when workers aren’t sick for months waiting on operations or mental health support, when freight moves on time, when planning decisions can happen in weeks, not years, when the police service can investigate rather than triage cases, when courts can hear cases this side of the next general election and when social care prevents crises rather than constantly mops up after it.
All of those things represent the state’s capacity for growth, and for fifteen years it’s been reduced, leading to the now, somehow, astonished expressions and exultations that the economy has, shock-horror, not grown.
Naturally, we made things that much worse for ourselves by leaving our biggest trading partner in a way that shoved sand into every single gear of our societal functions - from hiring to research to exports. “Global Britain” has turned out to mean new queues, new forms and a helluva lot of lanyards at trade fairs with very little interest in actually trading with us.
Add to that a pandemic that left a trail of illness and waiting lists, and you end up with a labour force with higher inactivity, lower resilience and very, very frayed trust - only to now tell that exact workforce that the solution on offer is yet another round of cuts to the services that are actually needed to help people return to productivity.
The place where the national delusion of growth through cuts gets punctured the most is in municipal ledgers.
Councils now seem to operate on a version of war-time triage: statutorily required services only, anything else than that is a luxury. Parks, libraries, youth services, cultural grants, road maintenance, early-help teams - all the bits and pieces that make up the connective tissue of a civilised country - have been thinned to near transparency.
Local leaders talk about “core offers” which is gentle phrasing for a brutal concept - we will do the absolute legal minimum and little more because we simply cannot do so.
This is usually where the “waste” merchants point when promising their pain-free savings - visit one of these councils and ask which line you would zero out:
Respite for carers?
The domestic abuse refuge beds?
The street-lighting upgrade contract?
The already shrunken environmental health team that keeps your takeaway from giving you salmonella?
Choose.
The NHS, my day-to-day domain of inhabitance, is in the same vice-like pincer8 - investment needs that have been decade in the making, workforce gaps you can’t wish away and budget rules that punish long-term sense.
We need hundreds of thousands of staff over the next decade while simultaneously forcing trusts to achieve “savings” that are achieved, by and large, by vacancy freezes and workforce attrition, all leading to a predictable result - longer waits, higher agency spend, worsening morale and a larger bill that becomes due later. If your plan to save the health service is based on fewer people delivering, your plan is a story, not a strategy.
Education, prisons, courts, policing - pick your service, the story repeats. We cut, we stretched, we congratulated ourselves on “doing more with less” and then one day woke up to discover that we were, in fact, doing less with less. The backlog in the criminal courts is now a calendar, not a queue, and a political party can talk about “being tough on crime” until it’s blue in the damned face, but if your case takes years to reach trial, justice is just a rumour.
All of this creates a situation in which the current political conversations that are still being held around yet more cutting feels so incredibly deranged. The government feverishly talks as though a fiscal rabbit may yet appear from a hat marked “waste” while at the same time seeming to promise us technological pixie dust that will effortlessly deliver costless services while at the same time lowering taxes. There seems to be a mass hysteria in Westminster in the belief that growth will miraculously arrive in the economy where the state - i.e. all the bits and pieces that private enterprise needs to function - is missing all its floorboards.
We just do not need another round of cuts - we need to desperately end this magical thinking that says cuts are neutral and investment is profligacy.
We are constantly reminded that choices need to be made - but why not choose better ones?
We could raise far more from wealth and windfall taxes, from modernising council tax and stamp duty and scrapping reliefs that reward rent-seeking above real investment.
We could choose to admit that debt spending to fix the roof is cheaper than the crane we’ll need to rebuild it, and that in an ageing, high income country, the state will simply cost more.
What we cannot do is choose to pretend that the endless snip-snip-snip will reveal a fitter nation instead of the emaciated one we currently have.
None of this needs to be shouted - we just need to match what we say we want with what we’re willing to fund. If we want a healthy workforce, that means investing in primary care, mental health and prevention.
If productivity is our goal, we need decent schools, training and transport.
If we’re looking at safe streets, we need police and courts that can actually function, and if it’s investment we need planners who can say “yes” before retirement.
My exasperation that you can sense in this ever-lengthening rant comes from just how obvious so much of this is - and how determined our political system seems to completely ignore it.
And while they stolidly ignore it, our country, the bit that exists outside of Westminster’s acoustics, councillors sign off on council tax rises they never wanted to make, Chief Execs write letters warning that they cannot hit all the targets without something collapsing, headteachers run raffles to patch roofs and patients carry pain and sick notes like they’re the national ID documents of our current age.
There is, in fact, a grown-up conversation available to us if anyone wants it - and it starts by admitting that the last fifteen years have left the state dangerously threadbare.
That conversation continues by acknowledging to ourselves that growth will not materialise until we repair the bits of the state that are meant to enable it.
The conversation ends with - and this is the part that makes our politicians go pale - with a choice to raise more money and spend it on things that actually make the country work.
I am not suggesting a blank cheque of any sort, and I’m not saying that any of this absolves the state of the need to actually be competent, transparent and capable of occasionally saying “no.” It simply means we stop lying to ourselves that we can cut our way back to the capacity we need.
Until we do these things, that damned sound will continue - the snip-snip-snip from parties promising miracles, manifestos written on the back of a fag packet and from budgets that speak the language of prudence while at the same time booking in the much higher cost of decay to their future selves.
We will continue to discover that the cheapest option is the one we rejected years ago, that prevention is better than fire-fighting, that paying people properly costs less than failing to recruit them in the first place and that fixing the roof was cheaper than replacing the house.
I would love nothing more than to switch off the noise and on my walk listen and hear birds, not blades, but the only way to silence the scissors is to put them down and pick up the tools to build things. Until we do, the UK will remain trapped in the paradox of a state expected to deliver more with less in a world that reliably punishes magic thinking, and the soundtrack of cutting, chopping and snipping will continue unabated.
This post was brought to you by a senior NHS manager currently making prolonged, unblinking and terrified eye-contact with the abyss of the coming winter. They abyss, for its part, seems unimpressed.
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Or send it to a friend who is also emotionally triaging the nation.
Linguists would call this code-switching - accountants call it crying.
Known as “statutory spending”, or the things you have to pay.
What this country has become is lean, nimble and completely incapable of standing upright anymore.
Luckily for you there’s a Costa in its place where you get to spend £4.80 to sit and have a coffee while staring at a plug socket.
And replaced with a management consultant with a Power Point titled “Synergy Through Starvation.”
Like watching a hyperactive toddler run full tilt into a glass door labelled “reality.”
Somewhere out there a Treasury intern is scribbling this on a whiteboard titled “Fiscal Doctrine of Suffering.”
Not to alarm everyone, but the vice is winning.
Oh there's "waste" alright... I've just got back from a two day meeting (in what is called a Hybrid Sector institution) about how much we're shelling out to Microsoft, Cisco, various other suppliers and tech companies... But we NEED digital ID, and that £1.2M piece of software (offshore registered company naturally) that allows you to trace who is accessing kiddie/donkey pron and bomb making sites and suicide chatrooms because we must as part of PREVENT, and the Online Safety Act, the HSE, the Higher Education (insert noble cause here) Act etc etc. Except we're not paying that because if they're determined enough they'll be using Tor browsers and anonymous VPNs, and we can't inspect that traffic anyway, but at least we can tick the checkbox of "all reasonable measures". £1.2M that could be spent on say a second trauma simulation suite for training paramedics, or more of the actual new kit that will be in use on wards next year that trainees can be let loose on.
All the time we are under the watchful gaze of various other (definitely private sector) vultures that are eyeing up not only the fat of the land but the pound of flesh as well.
Bear dear chap, I started my first proper job in the late 1970s, in the public sector where I remained in different organisations for most of my working life.
What you have written is essentially the narrative for much of that time. Starting with Thatcher, who came to power just over a year later, and her economically ignorant mindset that an economy is akin to a household budget, unjustified parsimony has been the rule at least for ordinary people.
I could write endlessly about my experiences but that would be boring and frankly your erudite and passionate piece does that job far better.
When they cut, cut, cut they avoid dealing with the real issue that you describe. Lack of growth.
There is a two pronged way to turn things around.
The first is to tax wealth.
The second is to rejoin the EU. No referendum and Farage can go do one. Start negotiations to rejoin straight away with a sense of urgency and drive. They would be the turning point.
Then renationalising utilities like power and water and running them for the benefit of the public.